Literary sojourns
THE Mumbai branch of the Theosophy Hall was recently the venue of a lively panel discussion organised by the Max Mueller Bhavan and the All India Centre of the PEN on literary practices in relation to the urban environment. The panelists included Sandra Hoffmann, an award-winning writer from Germany, who completed a writer-in-residence stint (from July 2 to August 21) at the MMB, as part of Akshar, a literary exchange programme coinciding with India's presence as guest of honour at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair. She writes short stories, and has two full-length books to her credit: Schwimmen gegen Blond (2002) and Den Himmel zu Füßen (2004).
Hoffmann's first novel Schwimmen Gegen Blond (Swimming Against Blonde) consists of weekly diary entries spread over the period of a year. The novel's protagonist is a woman who cannot decide for or against her lover and spends a year developing new strategies to help her approach the object of her love only to distance herself again.
Unlike the character in the novel, Hoffmann has distinct views on whether a novelist or poet ought to read well ("Nein, it is not necessary," she said, disagreeing with my position that "the text should be read with feeling").
Akshar, the Indo-German Writers in Residence project, which brought Sandra Hoffmann to India with six other German writers, also took seven Indian authors on a journey of discovery through Germany. The German authors arrived in June and began to write about their impressions of different cities while their Indian counterparts are recording their experiences in Germany.
Before their literary sojourn ends, the German authors will have travelled to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and New Delhi, while the Indians will visit Stuttgart, Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Leipzig and Berlin.
The Indian writers are Swapnamoy Chakraborti from West Bengal, Adyasha Das from Orissa, Mahesh Dattani and Mogalli Ganesh from Karnataka, Bhupinder Aziz Parihar from Punjab, Maythil Radhakrishnan from Kerala and Rajula Shah from Madhya Pradesh. The German-speaking writers include Guy Helminger, Sandra Hoffmann, Angela Krauß, Kristof Magnusson, Martin Mosebach, Georg Martin Oswald and Josef Winkler.
RONITA TORCATO
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